5 Ways To Improve Hill Repeat Workouts
Hill repeats are an effective way for cyclists across many disciplines to perform their interval training.
The steep gradients of climbs offer specificity to the demands of competition, where climbs often play a decisive role in races and events, and stress different muscle fibres compared when to when training on flatter terrain.
For these reasons, hill repeats are an efficient way to train and offer benefits to both time-poor and time-rich cyclists alike.
Here are some simple steps you can take to improve the quality of your hill repeat sessions...
1: Use a target range
We’ve spoken multiple times in our articles, emails and one-to-one advice about using ‘ranges’ when it comes to training intensity targets related to heart rate figures, power numbers and the oft-forgotten ratings of perceived exertion.
The issue is that many cyclists target a singular number for their hill repeat intervals and subsequently find it difficult to pace these efforts accurately, especially when new to training with power, which is quite stochastic in comparison to heart rate.
Tip: Instead of targeting 315 Watts or 180 BPM as your target for a set of intervals, try something like 300-330 Watts or 175-185 BPM as your target range. If you allow yourself that kind of margin, you’ll often find you pace your intervals very close to the singular number you would have set anyway.
It’s important to remember than intensity is a spectrum, where the various intensity domains blur into one another, rather than being hard cross-over points from one to another, so padding out an intensity target with a range above and below to operate within is unlikely to hinder the adaptive response, so long as the range is not too broad for the stimulus you are trying to induce.
2: Negative splitting
The idea of a negative split, which is a concept borrowed from running, is simply to go faster in the second half of a session or race than in the first half.
In trying to negative split your overall hill repeat interval session by holding back initially, you can help improve the chances of complete the full set of repeats to score more minutes at the necessary high intensities. Ensuring more time in the appropriate intensity zones will result in a far greater adaptive stimulus compared to blowing up and curtailing the session, even if the first repeat or two was performed at a very high workload.
Negative splitting also applies on a “per interval” basis too, where it often works well to start an interval off conservatively (i.e. at the lower end of the target range) and then increase the effort progressively as you go through the intervals.
Give it a try on your next session.
3: Use varying gradients
The effectiveness of your cycling hill repeats can be improved by sometimes choosing climbs that offer varying gradients within a single repeat.
A suitable hill might start off steep, transition to a flatter section and then pitch up again towards the end.
What this can do is help you to better cope with changes to your pedalling style (like cadence, seated or standing pedalling etc) and breaks in your rhythm, whilst still maintaining a high power output. Again, it comes down to specificity and how closely some of your workouts reflect what happens in competition.
If you can train to keep the power high when the road or trail changes beneath you, you’ll be in a better position to capitalise in a race or event when others who have not specifically trained such an ability begin to struggle.
4: Make each rep different
Hill repeats, like most interval-based workouts, are tough physically and mentally, and to get the most from them, you’ll often be forced to dig deep and push through some significant discomfort. From a psychological perspective, you can help make them more bearable by using constructive distraction techniques.
One such distraction technique is to change up a variable on each repetition in a set, i.e. riding the same hill, but in a slightly different way each time.
As an example, you might perform the first interval at a constant intensity top to bottom, the second interval going hard for 30 seconds and easy for 30 seconds repetitively, and the third starting and ending the interval very hard with a more steady state effort in between.
There’s always more than one way to train a certain ability, so don’t feel you have to do the exact same interval over and over again, but do be sure that the designs you choose and the variables you adjust don’t hinder the purpose of the session overall and begin to train other components of your physiology which you may not want to develop at that time.
5: Manipulate recovery time
Finally, building on the topic of adjusting training variables, the recovery time you allow yourself between your hill repeats can have a big impact on the tolerable duration of the workout as a whole and the adaptive stimulus it provides.
Knowing how much recovery time to allow yourself between reps largely comes down to what your overall session goal is, as well as your fitness level at the time, and the appropriate amount will change depending on these factors.
As an example, if your session is aimed at improving your maximal oxygen uptake or anaerobic capacity for instance, you’ll want to give yourself plenty of recovery time so that you can produce the necessarily high power outputs in the next interval repeats.
On the other hand, in other workouts, including those focused on lactate tolerance or buffering capacity, keeping recovery intervals short in duration will help with the accumulation of lactate and the metabolic byproducts of anaerobic metabolism, which can be a major factor in the quality of these specific adaptive stimuli.
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